


Bloom

by whichstiel



Series: Season 13 Codas [18]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode: s13e19 Funeralia, Episode: s13e20 Unfinished Business, Flower metaphors, Gen, episode coda, spn 13x19, spn 13x20
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-01
Updated: 2018-05-01
Packaged: 2019-04-30 19:48:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14504229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whichstiel/pseuds/whichstiel
Summary: Coda for 13x19 and 13x20





	Bloom

**I**.

“Watch the stairs on your way out, dear,” Rowena called sweetly after her latest applicant. She closed the door genteelly with a quiet click, blocking out the retreating back of her latest failed bodyguard. He’d been perfect: burly yet debonair, with an astonishing resume of private or illicit contracts. Unfortunately he had also been staunchly anti-witchcraft, so she’d been forced to wipe his memory and send him on his way. 

Rowena clicked her tongue disparagingly and made her way to the window so she could watch him leave. He lurched into the gate and a small city tree a half a block away, but otherwise didn’t cast a single glance back at her condominium complex. What was the saying? Good men were hard to get rid of? She pressed her forehead to the windowpane as he disappeared around the corner and deflated with a sigh. 

“Och, this was so much easier when I was determined to be bad.” She shook her head sadly. “Instead I must strive to be good. It’s dreadfully exhausting.” A light breeze set the tree outside her window to tapping, the bud-studded branch of the elderly magnolia tree breaking up the light with its windswept dance. “Ah, but you understand.” Rowena nodded at the tree. “You and I are in it for the long trot, aren’t we?

Before, she thought she had understood her earned longevity. She’d used magic as a tool to bind her to the world, thinking that she wielded it with a clear and honest mind. Until Sam Winchester had passed her the spell to unbind her powers, Rowena had forgotten magic. She’d forgotten the flavor of it, rich on her tongue with every breath. She’d forgotten the look of it, like pulsing purples veins joining the world into one ecstatic organism.

Now she could follow the magic down and drink it from its source. She could see both the tree and the seed. That fateful night Rowena performed the ritual, she saw her past. As the magic filled her again she followed each twisting root down to its termination. She saw the bright lights burned to black. Her once ebullient son, abandoned and damned. Her scraped and scrounged family betrayed.

Rowena flared with magic as the memory of her past and her avowed mission for her future filled her. She could feel the magic glowing from her, a mere conduit, and she smiled. Slowly, like ladies waking from sleep, the magnolia’s blossoms began to unfurl.

The buzzer burred loudly and Rowena turned suddenly from the window. She willed the magic to recede back into her bones and then strode to the intercom panel, pressing the button. “Yes?” She said sweetly.

“Bernard Appleshod, ma’am. Your ten o’clock.”

Rowena smiled. “So you are,” she said, and let him in.

 

**II.**

Billie sniffed the air again, and increased her pace down the library’s vaulted corridors. “Where in the…?” There should be no scents here, in Death’s library. The books here never held that sweet, dusty stench of paper bound books. The walls were pristine, the floors like mirrors - more wavelength than matter. Simply put, there was nothing that lived in Death’s library. So the fact that Billie could smell something floral tendriling through the stacks was immensely, possibly cosmically worrisome.

She stalked past the Sumerian sag section (with ancient books as new and perfectly preserved as when they had been formed) and finally found the source just on the outskirts of the ki section. “Earth,” Billie spat. “Of course.”

Just over the little eye symbol etched on the bookstack’s endcap bloomed a flower. Billie approached it warily. It was a wide white and pink blossom, fully opened to the darkness of the library. It had stiff petals and a stately pink and yellow stamen rising like a tower from its center. It smelled like vanilla and jasmine, like earth and rain.

Billie ran a careful finger along the edge of the magnolia blossom. The bloom seemed to shiver at her touch, but it did not wither the way she had expected, nor did it explode or close its petals and begin to speak, or any number of stranger possibilities. She fisted her hands and laid them on her hips, shoving her long, black coat back with a rattling flap. “Jessica!” She called sharply.

“Hello,” the reaper’s casual greeting ended on a gasp as she saw the flower on the endcap. “What’s that doing here?”

“That’s what I’m wondering.” Billie turned towards Jessica and raised one eyebrow. “The Winchesters?”

“Normal stuff. Hunting. Washing cars. Texting. They’re still out of grace.” Jessica shuddered delicately. “Nothing interesting.”

“Hmm.” Billie considered the flower for a moment then carefully reached out and plucked it from the side of the ki bookstack. The flower came away easily and rested in her palm.

Jessica ran her fingers over the shining bookshelf. There was no trace that a flower had ever inexplicably grown there. “I’ll do some digging. Look for anything unusual.”

“You do that,” Billie said with the easy threat of her cosmic role looming behind her words. She tossed the flower away from the library. It vanished before it hit the opposite wall.

 

**III.**

Sometimes thirst burned at Mary. Sometimes it clawed at her. And sometimes she was thirsty for so long, the notion of feeling sated felt like an utterly foreign concept. Mary took a carefully rationed sip from her canteen before slinging it back over her shoulder and trudging down the trail with the rest of the refugees on their way back to the resistance’s base.

The last battle had been rough, even with Jack’s ability to smite angels. The problem with showy weaponry like Jack’s powers was that it worked very well to destroy foolish individuals with large egos. However, the more clever or freethinking of their enemy - the humans in particular - had proven extraordinarily good at dividing their ranks and pursing relentlessly the small pockets that tried to break for freedom. Even with the showy angelic deaths there was still an interminable amount of clean-up. “Clean up” being a wildly optimistic euphemism for gritty no-holds-barred guerrilla warfare.

Mary held out a hand to steady a woman in front of her who had stumbled on a buckled tree root, displeased to see her fingers shake before she grabbed the woman’s elbow. God, she was sick of this place. What she wouldn’t give for a warm bed and a plate of crispy bacon and TV streaming on a laptop beside her. She suppressed a sigh and lifted her finger to gesture that she was going to fan out from the group for a quick assessment of their perimeter.

Further from the thunder dozens of pairs of feet made, she could almost pretend she was in a peaceful woodland. Snow had recently begun to dust the ground giving everything a pure picture card look. It gave the impression that the woodland wasn’t dead, but only dormant and waiting for spring.

Close to her ear, something crackled. Mary whirled around, weapon instantly at the ready. She expected an angel or one of the howling, inhuman demons. Instead, something small and pink wafted to the ground. Mary frowned and crouched down.

It was a flower about the size of her palm, white with pink flushing along its petals. She recognized it though the name whiffed unremembered around the back of her brain, buried in a vault of what she generally considered to be useless knowledge. Slowly, Mary picked up the flower. She glanced around again and when she saw nothing but bare woods she brought it to her nose. Feeling dangerously like Dorothy in a poppy field, she inhaled and let the delicate fragrance fill her nostrils.

When she didn’t pass out from it, and the world continued its unwavering awfulness, she took the flower and tucked it just inside her jacket, where the silky cool petals pressed against her skin. The bloom felt sacred, like a message from her boys. Mary stood and flexed her chilly fingers. Then, feeling somewhat lighter, she continued her patrol of the woods.

**Author's Note:**

> Busy busy, yet here at last are some words!
> 
> Thanks for reading! I'm on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/whichstiel) and [Tumblr](http://whichstiel.tumblr.com/) @ whichstiel. You may also like the Supernatural recap and gif blog I co-write/curate, [Shirtless Sammy](https://shirtlesssammy.tumblr.com/).


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